AIs like ChatGPT are known for crafting essays and blog articles in a heartbeat. But often, the articles they produce are generic and dry. You need to do something extra to give the words some spirit or pizzazz. One of the fastest ways to do that is to specify a writing style or naming a famous author in the prompt.

Say you want a paragraph on the importance of friendship. A generic prompt like, “Write me a paragraph on the importance of friendship,” will yield a generic response from ChatGPT.

Blah. It’s so bland. Results change when you add specifications, like “Please write in an informal, conversational style.” ChatGPT comes up with something like this:

That’s a little better.

And if you feel a little fancy, you can ask ChatGPT to write in the style of one of the literary greats, like Mark Twain:

The text now is starting to sing. But it doesn’t have to be a famous author. You can use well-known individuals as well—like Chris Rock.

Or how about those “millennials”?

Copy Your Writing Style

What if you want GPT-3 to write an email or blog in your style?

Simply showing it some previous content that you have written is enough. Here is an example, where we show GPT-3 some emails 'Dr. Rodriguez' has written in the past, and ask it to write a new email in the same style to a new patient, Mr. Inuez.

You can input any text you have written in the past (emails, reports, blogs, etc.), and GPT-3/ChatGPT will usually be able to copy your style. The more text you put, the better it can copy your style.

Sander Schulhoff

Sander Schulhoff is the Founder of Learn Prompting and an ML Researcher at the University of Maryland. He created the first open-source Prompt Engineering guide, reaching 3M+ people and teaching them to use tools like ChatGPT. Sander also led a team behind Prompt Report, the most comprehensive study of prompting ever done, co-authored with researchers from the University of Maryland, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Princeton, Stanford, and other leading institutions. This 76-page survey analyzed 1,500+ academic papers and covered 200+ prompting techniques.